In coming months, the
housing/mortgage crisis in this country is projected to worsen according to most major pundits. Already,
it's eclipsed the numbers witnessed during the Great Depression. And, as DKos FP'er
Laurence Lewis pointed out today, "Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin says the foreclosure outlook remains '
grim.'"
Income inequality between the classes is the greatest it's ever been since they first introduced the metrics (to measure same) in this country.
As we applaud a modest decrease in the monthly trade deficit while, concurrently, oil prices rise and/or stay elevated (undermining this entire story), don't look too closely at the numbers, since you'll then realize that October's trade deficit was only a few billion shy of the records set just a few months ago.
Interest-rate spreads on sovereign credit default swaps for Portugal, Greece, Spain and Ireland are now either near or eclipsing what they were back in the Spring, at the height of the (first, of 2010, in any event) Greek
sovereign debt crisis in Europe. (At the time, many in the U.S. mentioned this "contagion" as having an adverse impact upon our own economy.) This time around,
it's Ireland with Portugal, Spain and Greece (still/again) waiting in the wings for the other shoe to drop. Meanwhile, markets around the world await word of
Irish government acceptance of an 11th-hour EU/IMF rescue, essentially doing for Ireland what the EU/IMF did for Greece, just months ago: kicking the can just a short way down the road. (One doesn't need an economics degree to understand that if you're paying upwards of 8%-10% interest on your sovereign debt, it makes the cost of the debt virtually impossible for a country to repay it.)
Further exacerbating our country's economic position on the world stage, and as many indicated would be the case, including yours truly, President Obama was confronted with a cold shoulder from many of the world's leaders (also see: HERE) at the just-concluded G-20 summit Seoul.
Back on the home front, we'll be very lucky if Democrats manage to get the legislative branch of our federal government to extend unemployment insurance coverage to the 1.2 million Americans that have either lost, or will lose, their coverage this month, alone. Monday's NY Times tells us it's more than 1.2 million:
...Nearly lost among the talk of expiring tax rates for the wealthy is another deadline: after Nov. 30, emergency federal benefits for about two million long-term unemployed Americans will end. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, will try this week to pass an extension, but failing that, many Democrats want extended jobless aid to be the price of any compromise on the tax cuts...
Meanwhile, states can't even fund their own unemployment benefits. California, alone, is borrowing $40 million per day from the federal government, just to cover their jobless benefits tab.
Concurrent with the state-related financial issues, noted immediately above, many are saying the municipal bond marketplace is making a beeline for collapse, too.
# # #
Over the past 24 hours, many highly-respected pundits are (pretty much) all telling us the exact same thing, to paraphrase legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi: "The best defense is a strong offense!"
WILLIAM GREIDER...
Again, as DKos FP'er Laurence Lewis noted it, earlier on Sunday, William Greider nailed at least part of the problem in an article in The Nation:
...Given the election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with admirable skill and seriousness.
What's missing with this president is power--a strong grasp of the powers he possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his rhetoric and substantive policy positions....
People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first--his own supporters talking back--but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.
And, apparently, in the NY Times, Frank Rich (on Sunday) and Paul Krugman (today), concur.
FRANK RICH...
Frank Rich asks the question in the headline of his column in today's NY Times: "Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?"
Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
By FRANK RICH
New York Times
November 14, 2010
...The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election -- those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There's no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that's not nailed down.
The Americans I'm talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid -- the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation's pretax income in 2007 -- up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent's pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.
Rich points out it's the uber-rich, "...not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there's an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples)." But, he tells us the G.O.P., while vowing "...to fight to the end to award this bonanza," may not even have to go there, due to "...the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress."
On last Sunday's "60 Minutes," Obama was already wobbling toward another "compromise" in which he does most of the compromising. It's a measure of how far he's off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn't even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president's argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS's Steve Kroft, "the question is -- can we afford to borrow $700 billion?"
That's a good question, all right, but it's not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...
Rich continues on to remind us that "...the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970."
He asks how some Wall Street hedge fund managers could earn a billion or more per year but "...pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?" Basically, Rich says it's really all about Republicans and Democrats kowtowing to "high-rolling donors," over a very extended period of time.
Quoting the book, "Winner-Take-All Politics," we're told they've been been busy "'...building a bridge to the 19th century' -- that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics..."
Just like the propaganda/spin from our own government, the world keeps spinning, and it doesn't look like it's in America's direction.
PAUL KRUGMAN...
"The World as He Finds It"
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
November 15, 2010
...the failure to act forcefully on the economy, more than anything else, accounts for the midterm "shellacking."
Even given the economy's troubles, however, the administration's efforts to limit the political damage were amazingly weak...
As I noted in the opening sentences of my diary from last Sunday, November 7th:
As many reading my diaries will gladly remind you, I have been rather vociferous with regard to my criticism of the current administration's economic policies. (I consider myself to be somewhat of a diehard believer in the New Keynesian school of economic thought; and those policies conflict with the Neo-Keynesian [i.e.: "Old Keynesian"] thinking of those President Obama appointed to manage the economy under his watch.) But, the fact is--as I've also reiterated it on countless occasions--I will vote for him for re-election in 2012, too.
If there's any other area where I've been especially critical of the administration, it has been in the ongoing messaging errors of the White House communications staff, in general...
Krugman tells us in today's NYT column that the President hasn't improved upon his messaging issues since Election Day.
...At the predictably unproductive G-20 summit meeting in South Korea, the president faced demands from China and Germany that the Federal Reserve stop its policy of "quantitative easing" -- which is, given Republican obstructionism, one of the few tools available to promote U.S. economic recovery. What Mr. Obama should have said is that nations' running huge trade surpluses -- and in China's case, doing so thanks to currency manipulation on a scale unprecedented in world history -- have no business telling the United States that it can't act to help its own economy.
But what he actually said was "From everything I can see, this decision was not one designed to have an impact on the currency, on the dollar." Fighting words!
And then there's the tax-cut issue. Mr. Obama could and should be hammering Republicans for trying to hold the middle class hostage to secure tax cuts for the wealthy. He could be pointing out that making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent is a huge budget issue -- over the next 75 years it would cost as much as the entire Social Security shortfall. Instead, however, he is once again negotiating with himself, long before he actually gets to the table with the G.O.P.
Krugman reminds us that we're talking about a man with "immense power." But, he posits that the President is not using it. He could veto legislation. He still, quite arguably, has some degree of control over the Senate. He has his own bully pulpit. And, he has the executive authority to: "...act on things like mortgage relief -- there are billions of dollars not yet spent, not to mention the enormous leverage the government has via its ownership of Fannie and Freddie. Abroad, he still leads the world's greatest economic power -- and one area where he surely would get bipartisan support would be taking a tougher stand on China and other international bad actors."
Concluding, Krugman states...
But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand. And the signs aren't good.
Earlier in the weekend, Krugman talked about the Cat Food Commission's highly-publicized deficit reduction proposals in the same vein, in: "The Soft Bigotry of Low Deficit Commission Expectations."
And, of course, I covered this matter quite extensively in my diary on Friday: "Naked Cap, Krugman To Cat Foodies: 'F*ck You!' 'Go Away.'"
# # #
So, what to do? What to do? As I find myself doing more and more frequently referencing them these days, I want to closeout tonight with the most recent commentary from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Naked Capitalism Publisher Yves Smith.
(Also, for "extra credit" reading, heh, checkout this from blogger George Washington: "The Economy Will Not Recover Until the Economic Criminals are Prosecuted, and There Are Real Investigations Into 9/11 and Other Government Failures.")
IMHO, the answers are there and they've been staring us in the face for quite some time.
What we need is the will of the people standing-up behind the President, as William Greider pointed out towards the beginning of this post. Reiterating Greider...let the President draw strength from his supporter's courage.
People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first--his own supporters talking back--but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.
What we REALLY NEED is a lot MORE SUBSTANCE, and a lot LESS SPIN!
The morning after the mid-terms, I wrote about Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing redux ("QE2") announcement, in: "You Thought Last Night Was Bad? Just Wait Another 4 Hours."
And, yes, Krugman (resigned to the fact that we cannot realistically get an increased Main Street stimulus anytime soon) has come out, tepidly, in favor of this. But, as many have noted, it's a "hail, Mary" on Bernanke's part, at best. At worst, it's certainly another veiled bailout for Wall Street -- perhaps on many levels.
JOSEPH STIGLITZ...
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has been quite consistent--for YEARS now--with regard to what's really needed to get our economy back on track. And, once again, he covers it in Sunday's LA Times: "Experts weigh in: Can the economy be saved?"
Federal spending is a necessity
By Joseph Stiglitz
Los Angeles Times
November 14, 2010
The only solution to our current economic doldrums is large government spending. And if the spending is focused on high-return investments (in education, technology and infrastructure), the nation's debt-to-GDP ratio will actually be lowered. The question isn't whether we can afford to make these investments; we can't afford not to.
Even then, robust recovery won't happen until we write down the debts of the 1 in 4 homes whose mortgages are underwater, in a homeowner's chapter 11 program. We have allowed overburdened corporations a fresh start; why not poor Americans?
Nor will a robust recovery return until we get our dysfunctional financial system doing what it should be doing: providing credit, managing risk, running an efficient electronic payments system. The deservedly hated "bailout" may have kept the financial system from collapsing, but it also extended the government's safety mainly to rich and powerful banks. Smaller banks, focused on actually providing credit to small businesses, the lifeblood of any economy, were allowed to die. The Dodd-Frank regulatory bill was a step in the right direction, but it was a small step, with neither carrots nor sticks to ensure that banks go back to doing "boring" banking. They still are likely to make more money from credit schemes and predatory lending, from writing derivatives and credit default swaps (which may be viewed as gambling or insurance products but aren't regulated as either and are underwritten by taxpayers), and by imposing a tax on every credit and debit card transaction at a rate determined not by competitive forces but the exertion of monopoly power.
--SNIP--
...Little of the stimulus money went to reshape the country, to make it more competitive, more dynamic, more respectful of the environment or less unequal...
--SNIP--
...It's still not too late, but we have wasted both valuable time and money.
And, while I believe it is another, bigger round of stimulus that'll truly turn the tide for our country's economy, what we're (apparently) ending up with is "nuclear spin."
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MANUFACTURING OF CONSENT...
(Who says U.S. manufacturing is dying? Heh...)
You see, in many ways, quantitative easing is really about boosting asset prices; primarily, as Bernanke has acknowledged, himself, it's about pumping the stock market. From Zero Hedge:
...now, courtesy of an Op-Ed by the current chairman, we get confirmation, again, just three months later, that the Fed cares mostly about stimulating high stock prices, solely to create the completely artificial illusion of "wealth" for the few, the proud, the shareholders, and the banking oligarchy.
Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.
See, the thing is Bernanke is absolutely right... when it comes to a few hundred thousand "consumers" (out of over 330 million). One group of Americans whose wealth is tied into the equity value of any given company, typically insiders, are more than happy to take advantage of this massive surge in artificial stock valuations. This last week for example they took over 660 million advantages worth. We repeatedly demonstrate that the ratio of insider selling to buying is now beyond grotesque. In the past week alone it hit over 400 (and was over 2,300 a few weeks ago) - see chart at bottom of post. So yes, those for whom Bernanke's "easing" is working, are taking advantage of it. As for the other group of beneficiaries, the ones who are going to receive over $100 billion in bonuses this year, well: they already literally own Bernanke, so we are not too worried about them either.
As for everyone else, tough luck...
Much like Bernanke's QE2, now it's really all about the spin...but, again, don't take Zero Hedge's word for it, nor my own.... it's all about "the manufacturing of consent."
Consent's being manufactured for rationalizing why we must extend tax cuts for the rich.
And, just two days ago, on Saturday, Krugman spoke (again), about how the Cat Food Commission is feebly attempting to manufacture consent for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, not to mention ongoing income shifts from the lower and middle classes to the upper class, in: "The Soft Bigotry of Low Deficit Commission Expectations."
As Krugman discussed it again, in his blog on Saturday...
...What the commission was supposed to do was something much harder: it was supposed to produce a package that Congress would give an up and down vote. To do this, it would have to produce something much better than a package with some good stuff buried in among the bad stuff; it would have to produce a package good enough to accept as is.
And it didn't do that...Instead of cutting through the fog, the commission brought out an extra smoke machine.
Or put it another way: what on earth are people who say things like, "This proposal can be a starting point for discussion" thinking? We've been discussing and discussing, ad nauseam; the commission was supposed to provide a finishing point for discussion. Instead, it produced a PowerPoint that is one part stuff that has long been on the table, one part conservative wish-list, and one part just weirdly ill-considered.
The kindest thing we can do now is pretend the whole thing never happened.
# # #
(Note: Diarist has received written authorization from Naked Capitalism Publisher Yves Smith to reprint her blog's diaries in their entirety for the benefit of the DKos community.)
Robert Shiller Advocates and Engages in NewSpeak and Dubious Analysis in NYT Piece
Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism
November 14, 2010
As an article in today's New York Times makes clear, Robert Shiller has joined a group of behavioral economists that are advocating the use of propaganda and the sublter forms of manipulation of the public that Walter Lippmann famously called "the manufacture of consent." In one sense, this ugly development is coming full circle. Lippmann and the so-called father of the pubilc relations industry, Eddie Bernays, were both members of the Creel Commission, which in a remarkably short period of time, turned a pacifist US into a nation eager to attack bloodthirsty, baby-bayonting Germans in the Great War. When the public became aware of the scale of the Creel Commission effort and realized how they had been played, Lippmann and Bernays wound up writing books defending this sort of effort.
Lippmann's book Public Opnion argued, in keeping with T. S. Eliot, that human beings cannnot bear very much reality, although Lippmann based his case on the complexity of the modern world versus the limits of human cognition. Lippman contended any portrayal of events was subjecive and growing mass communication media were vehicles for manipulation. He claimed that this "manufacture of consent" was necessary for social cohesion; that the world needed to be simplified by the "well informed" so ordinary people could make decisions.
Bernays' book Propaganda came later in the 1920s, and presented a far more benign picture, that the role of experts in helping the public navigate the public was well-intentioned and necessary, and presented numerous instances of how he had gotten various decision-makers to take up his clients' interests by presenting persuasive information and what we would now call product imaging. But despite Bernays' "win-win" gloss, his most famous follower was Reich Minsiter of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, made use of psychological techniques, and the advertising industry has followed the path he blazed (I strongly recommend the four part BBC series, The Century of the Self, which you can watch on Google Video). So it isn't surpising that behavioral economics, which was spurred by the work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, should now be seen as a tool for elite groups and powerful interests to further their aims.
The problem, of course, is that the people who are in the role of manufacturing consent have their own interests and agendas. Lippmann pointed out how they could and did seek to present a self-flattering image.
But even if you assume, contrary to human nature, that the behind-the-scenes experts are paragons of virtue, the logic of the idea that experts can really do all that much better is circular. If the world is so complex that we are all reduced to working with mental models, or as Lippmann called it, "the pictues inside our head," experts are also ultimaely plagued with the same problem of limited cognitive capablities as ordinary folks. The poster child of this problem is the economics profession. Thanks to the privileged policy role that economists play, the world of the new millenium, with its light regulation, more open markets, and high level of international trade, represents a large shift from the world of the 1950s and 1960s, and this redesign was overseen by the elite economists. They remained blind to the growing danger of financial system risk-taking and instability and rationalized clear warning signs, like plummeting consumer savings rates. And in the wake of the crisis, many employ rationalizations like "strucural unemployment" to divert attention from their failure to anticipate this mess and their inability to devise remedies.
It's ironic and a bit sad that Shiller penned this appalling New York Times piece. He was one of the few economists to warn of the dangers of the housing bubble. Yet now he seems to be siding with some of the most questionable impulses of his discipline, namely, a clumsy effort at sleight of hand to defend a dubious orthodoxy. In other words, the article, which defends the manipulation of public opinion, also contains crude bits of propagandizing.
This is the second paragraph of Shiller's article, "Bailouts, Reframed as `Orderly Resolutions',":
The criticism has emphasized the trillions of taxpayer dollars that the bailouts put at risk. But, in fact, the realized losses were minuscule when compared with the widespread suffering they averted. The net losses of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, for example, which ran from October 2008 to October 2010, amounted to only $30 billion by the latest estimate. Yet TARP may have prevented many trillions of dollars of losses in gross domestic product.
Let's count the intellectually dishonest arguments here:
1. As we have discussed repeatedly, the idea that TARP = total bailout costs is Big Lie, pure and simple. There have been tons of other covert subsidies, from paying the AIG credit default swaps counterparties out at 100 cents on the dollar, to the alphabet soup of Fed faciliite during the crisis, to ZIRP, QE and QE2. Negative real interest rates represent a tax on savers and investors. But Shiller simply ignores all that.
2. "Latest loss estimate" clevely implies that it is the most accurate by virtue of being the most recent. But it isn't. The estimate Shiller cites comes from the Treasury, which has every reason to paint as pretty a picture as possible. And it has. SIGTARP'ss latest report roundly criticized Treasury for reducing its estimate of the cost of the AIG rescue by over $40 billion through a reclassification process.
3. "TARP may have prevented many trillions of dollars of losses". This is a two for one in the truthness camp. First, "may have prevented" gets Shiller off the hook for failing to make a definitive statement, yet plants a firm impression in the reader's mind. In addition, it sets up a false dichotomy, TARP v. doing nothing, when the choice was TARP doing something more sensible, like shutting down sick banks, firing management, spinning off good assets and taking the bad ones and working them out.
Now the next, truly bizarre bit of positioning in the piece: Shiller takes the process outlined above, the one that was used in the US in the savings and loan crisis and in the Nordic countries during their early 1990s financial crises, and calls it "bailouts" as if that is where the risk of negative public reacion lies:
Our principal hope for dealing with the next big crisis is the Dodd-Frank Act, signed by President Obama in July. It calls for bailouts of a sort, but has reframed them so they may look better to taxpayers. Now they will be called "orderly resolutions."
Huh? It's widely acknowledged that Dodd Frank is too weak. In the Treasury meeting with bloggers last August, Geithner didn't argue the point much, but instead contended that big enough capital levels, which were on the way with Basel III, were the real remedy.
It's also widely recognized that the special resolution process in Dodd Frank is a non-starter as far as the institutions that pose the greatest systemic risk are concerned, the really big internation dealer banks. A wind-up of these firms is subject to the bankruptcy proceedings of all the foreign jurisdictions in which it operates; the US can't wave a magic wand in Dodd Frank and make this elephant in the room vanish.
In addition, no one has found a way to resolve a major trading firm without creating major disruption. According to Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, Harvey Miller the top bankruptcy lawyer in the US, warned when Lehman was told to file for bankruptcy that even the closure of a medium-sized broker-dealer was a significant market event. Whenever you shut down a troubled trading business, the counterparties (ex derivatives coutnerparties, who get perversely favorable treatment as a result of the 2005 bankruptcy law changes) have their positions frozen until the windown process sorts out who gets how much. No trader wants to be stuck like that, so they will flee at the first sign of trouble, with the odds high that counterparties will bolt before the authorities have deciced to proceed with resolution. The run on Bear took place over the course of a mere ten days.
Shiller's insistence that the public is so dumb as to confuse a windown with a balout reveals his lack of connection with popular perceptions. The reason the public is so angry with the baiouts is no one, particularly among the top brass, lost his job, and worse, the firms were singularly ungrateful, thumbing their noses as taxpayers and paying themselves record bonuses in 2009.
Shiller is somehow worried that people will confuse the short-term (say 2-5 year) funding of working capital while "bad bank" assets were resolved with the hated 2008 bailouts. That's simply bizarre, Large segments of the public would probably cheer, provided no dismissed senior executives had a severance package honored (meaning they would be fired for cause, which in most contracts will nullify severance provisions). Similarly, while Congress was very unhappy to make a roughly $50 billion allocation to the Resolution Trust Corporation, it was not a flash point with the public.
The reason a resolution is not that it looks like a bailout, but that some depict it as nationalization, meaning men in beards, wearing fatigues and carrying machine guns are expropriating assets. How can Shiller forget the debate over natonalization in early 2009, when Obama came into office?
This bit is also misleading on several levels:
On a Friday in July 2008, for example, the F.D.I.C. kept IndyMac Bank alive when its survival was in doubt. The agency moved in swiftly to transform IndyMac into a bridge bank, called the IndyMac Federal Bank, and the changeover went so smoothly that many depositors might not have even noticed. The cash machines remained in operation over the weekend, and, on Monday, customers saw what seemed to be the same bank.
First, no big dealer bank is going to be resolved neatly over a weekend as Shiller suggests. Second, the "many depositors never noticed" is hugely misleading. IndyMac was notorious because unsecured depositors took huge losses. The big reason Citigroup is permanently too big to fail is that it runs a major international cash management business on which many large businesses depend. As a result, Citigroup has uninsured foreign deposits in the hundreds of billions.
Shiller goes on to discuss the merits of better "framing" in the political arena, as if the right wing haven't been onto that since the 1970s. But his article is peculiarly reassuring. If most economists are as out of touch with public perceptions and the state of the dark art of propaganda as Shiller is, we the great unwashed public have little to fear from the economics profession jumping on the manufacture of consent bandwagon.
The one good bit of news.
# # #
In short, Democrats lost badly this month because of the economy. "It's the economy, stupid!"
And, until we challenge the corporatist status quo in an effective manner, head-on, "pushing" the President to do likewise, at every turn, the tagline for Democratic fail will continue to be: "It's the propaganda, stupid!"
Because as anyone with an I.Q. higher than the temperature on a cold winter's day will tell you: "We reap what we sow."
And, for Democrats to continue to hype how great things are on Wall Street will do nothing but insure a bumper crop for the GOP in 2012, too. Because whether you want to acknowledge this, or not, things ain't getting much better on Main Street--at least as far as our economy's concerned--anytime soon.
So, we can keep doing what we're doing, and we'll keep getting what we've got.
Or, we can push back on the corporatist bullshit at every turn, unrelentingly.
Those ARE the Democratic Party's choices on November 15th, 2010. Period.
(To expect anything else would be the actual definition of insanity, at least according to Albert Einstein; and he was a pretty smart guy.)